


Red

by Dualscar



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Character Death, Humanstuck, M/M, Sadstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-06
Updated: 2012-12-06
Packaged: 2017-11-20 11:23:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/584878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dualscar/pseuds/Dualscar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Valentine's Day, and Cronus Ampora has some time to himself to think about all the associations the scarlet hue has to him. Somewhere else, his boyfriend is waiting for him to come home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Homestuck and all its characters belong to Andrew Hussie. I merely weave tales.

The moon was out, the sky was clear and cloudless. A fresh, invigorating breeze wafted along with it the smell of chocolate and flowers, as I passed yet another shop all decked up for Valentine’s Day. Beside me walked smitten couples, giggling and clutching flowers and large, colorful bags. Along the signposts and store gates loitered despondent singles with hands in their pockets, glancing languidly at the passing men and women, sighing occasionally, and looking at the stars as though they had no other solace that night except the twinkling glow of those faraway pinpricks.

I didn’t blame them. Once upon a time I would have found myself in the same situation, except I would probably have been more tearful about it and run home to my trusty guitar and tissue scraps where I would pen down heartfelt poetry. 

That was until I met Kankri, the love of my life. Was it too early to call him that? I really didn’t care very much. He wasn’t as well-off as I was, and he attended the same university that I did off a partial scholarship. At first I didn’t pay him any attention - I usually didn’t pay nerds much attention, but then once he stood up for me when a bunch of people started bullying me, and without so much as raising a finger, he scared them off merely with his impressive vocabulary and commanding tone of voice.

Ever since then I had been in his debt, and would glance at him through my peripheral vision, until I finally wrote him some music as a gift of gratitude. His reaction to it was hilarious - one I will never forget. Anyway, since then, the two of us gradually warmed up to each other. Or well, I warmed up to him. He was an excellent listener when it came down to it, but any friend of his had to put up with the additional burden of listening to his long, intellectual sermons. I grew used to them after a few months, but sometimes they did get quite annoying, so one evening I kissed him to make him stop talking in the library.

You can imagine the look of terror on his face. It was simply priceless. It took Vantas another month to accept his feelings for me, and I, being the patient guy that I was, had been waiting for him to finally blurt them out.

Needless to say, we grew close. And when he was unable to afford his apartment, I offered to let him move into my house. It was quite palatial, after all - my parents were nothing short of wealthy. We were distantly descended from royalty, of course.

That night, I held a bouquet of the freshest red roses in my hand as I walked home, inhaling the air, thick with the scent of love and warmth, mildly tinged with the metallic tang of loneliness. I smiled as I envisioned Kankri’s reaction to the flowers. They would match his sweater perfectly.

I turned down a side street. This was a little known shortcut to my house, and I wanted to make sure Kankri couldn’t see me from the windows. The road was deserted, and the sounds of laughter and music from the main street started to die down. My shoes clacked on the tarmac, and to break the eerie silence, I started whistling the tune of a song I was thinking of writing for him. 

Then my breath hitched, and the roses dropped to the ground, as something caught my throat.

* * *

 

_Kankri? Kankri? Kankri?_

His name was pulsing through my wrist, his warmth was caressing my face, and there the familiar red was, yes -

No. This wasn’t Kankri. 

I attempted to sit up, but a stab of pain down my spine meant that I had to brace myself for the thud as I collapsed back down. I tried to blink, but my eyelashes had been interwoven together, refusing to budge. There was a dull throbbing in one eye, and I tentatively reached up to feel it. The skin felt raw and bruised and wrinkled, and I saw blood on my trembling fingers.

No, this wasn’t Kankri. I was bleeding, I was bleeding and in terrible pain. As soon as that realization came over me it was like the floodgates had been opened, and the discomfort was numbing, oh, it was crippling, and I doubled over, unable to hear myself screaming into the thick of the night.

Then I heard shuffling and muffled voices. Instinctively I backed away, but there is only so much you far you can edge away when your backbone feels like it has snapped in two, and when your eyes are continually clogged by a color you had grown to love, a color you were growing to fear.

There was another voice, clearer than the rest, and after an agonizing moment I realized it was my own. It was so raspy, so broken, that I could hardly recognize it. “Please,” it said, and then it coughed.

Something rough and unfamiliar upon my cheek, which I later noticed to be a calloused hand. No sooner than had I taken note of that inconsequential detail, the very same five fingers curled themselves up into a fist and came speeding towards my gut. I hardly had the time to protest when I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me, and my head felt as though an unshakable fog had overtaken it. Sensation was immaterial. The line between delusion and reality was beginning to fade. “Ow,” I choked out.

Then a sudden, unseen force dragged me upright. My whole body wailed, and I was pretty sure I was wailing too, though I heard nothing more than an indistinct buzz in my ears. I think I said “Please” once more, but if I couldn’t hear myself, there was no guarantee that whatever, whoever was there could hear me either. I assumed it did, because after I spoke, I smelled alcohol on someone’s breath, and then my head flopped on my right shoulder. I had been hit. But everything was so dizzying, so unfocused, that I felt a rich gurgle from my throat; the warbling sound of a madman’s laughter. It took me all of ten seconds to realize that I was under attack, and that was not going to improve my chances of escaping, but in the time it took my brain to register that, I was lying face down on the ground, tasting dirt, tears and blood, rendered incapable of movement.

So I lay there and waited. I had never been too much of a fighter, and now I couldn’t fight even if I wanted to.

I blinked and saw blood from my forehead drip onto the ground, seep down to my tongue. Funnily enough, I wasn’t perturbed. I would have been if that crimson was a color I wasn’t used to seeing next to me every morning in the form of a sweater with a sleeping form curled up inside it. I would if I wasn’t used to seeing that crimson flicker at me from behind long, soft lashes when said sleeping form opened its eyes and looked at me, wishing me a gentle “Good morning, Cronus”.

Why, the line between delusion and reality had long faded, and red no longer seemed to me anything to be afraid of. Red was the color he painted into my soul, and it meant nothing but pure, undiluted happiness to me.

So when I was lifted up into the air again, and heard worrying whispers talking of my wealthy father and his gold; of all his dealings and of all the people wanting to bring him down; of them using me as bait to enrage him - I thought of nothing but the smile on Kankri’s face when I would go home to him and give him the roses. How his eyes would widen, how those captivating lashes would flutter as pink crept into his cheeks, how he would walk over to an empty vase and place the roses carefully into them before composing a long-winded thank you speech for me, which I would customarily interrupt with a timely little kiss, and how he would slacken in my arms, clutching the front of my shirt like a little child.

So when I felt the pain in my limbs dull, only to see something akin to a crimson red flower sprouting in the center of my chest, only to feel something I would liken to an electric shock leave me limp, the breath rapidly vanishing from my lungs, I closed my eyes and thought of him.

* * *

Perhaps it was moments, perhaps hours, perhaps even several days had passed when I opened my eyes. The world was dancing around my eyes, and my vision was dim. I tried to breathe, but there was something restricting the airflow. Very cautiously I lifted my head, and saw steel buried in my torso.

Ah. So I’d been stabbed.

I looked around myself. The street was as deserted as it was when I had come walking down it, and the whistling wind was all that reminded me that this wasn’t the abyss, and there were probably a few more minutes left before my eyes would shut for good.

Maybe it was that shock, maybe it was a miracle, but suddenly my brain seemed to work lightning fast and I was struggling to breathe and fumbling in my pocket for my now mildly dented phone, jabbing at it and pressing it to my ear, waiting for his voice to greet me.

For a while, all I could hear was the breeze and the repeated ringing. Then: “Cronus?”

The relief that spread through was indescribable, and my breath slowed and my muscles loosened. “Kankri…” I wondered if my voice sounded just as lifeless as it had earlier, or if his arrival on the other side of the line had injected new life into it. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”

He would probably have a faint smile on his lips now. Ah, and now it would hastily erase itself, and those lips would move to form words. “Oh, thank you indeed, Cronus, and I wish you the same. Well, the fact remains that you did wish me in the morning as well, and - “

I cut him off. Tonight his words sounded so much more melodious, so much smoother, and I could have listened forever. But the red woollen threads of time were slipping through my fingers. “Kankri…”

“Yes, Cronus?”

“I love you, darling…”

The expected pause. He would have probably blinked around five times now, gaping like the goldfish in the living room, before the sweet notes of his voice traveled through my ear again. “I love you too, Cronus. You know, it’s late. You should be home; I have something made for you.” He would have probably cooked something. A cake, perhaps. Or maybe he had made chocolate. He was an amazing cook. How I wished he could go home to taste what he had spent the day making for me, to have him kiss away the crumbs on my lips. 

“I know, love… I got you something too. Heh, it isn’t much…” And as if to prove the existence of that gift, the fingers of my free hand scrabbled at the ground before they caught at the ribbon holding the roses together, pulling them closer towards myself, red entering my vision again.

I couldn’t hear the wind any longer. Perhaps it blew in a different direction now, or perhaps my hearing was failing, because I had to strain myself to be able to hear Kankri’s words.

“…and I hope you didn’t tire yourself out; it’s a mere holiday, and tangible gifts mean nothing when compared to the thought behind them, so - “

I cut him off again. “Roses. I got you roses… just like your eyes. Red…” The rasp had crept into my voice again, and I prayed to whatever gods were listening that he had not noticed.

Maybe my voice didn’t come off as strange to him, but he understood that something was wrong. You could count on him to get paranoid, and I didn’t want that. Not now. 

“I’ll be home soon… Kankri, please.”

“Cronus, enough of that. I’m worried; you said you’d be home an hour earlier than this, and roses ought not to take y - “

“…Kankri, I love you. I love you. Don’t come looking for me…” And tears were obscuring my sight, and I felt them course down my blackened eyes, down my bloodied cheek. The knife in my chest suddenly felt a hundred pounds heavier, and I could not budge from the spot. It was as though gravity was sucking me in, as though the abyss had had enough of me clinging on to life.

And he was panicking now, and I was gripping the roses almost desperately, and breathing “I love you, I love you” into the phone repeatedly, and he was nearly screaming at me to stop it, and would I please explain myself, and was I ok, and I was crying and pleading that he stay calm, whispering that I was ok, and that he was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and I could picture him shaking his head in confusion and disbelief and fear, and I was helpless, so helpless, and the whole world was spinning, and he was all that mattered.

Then the wind began to blow again.

This time, it was softer, it sounded more beautiful. It sounded like a thousand angels had come to spirit me away to a realm where none of this pain and fear would exist.

A single rose petal fluttered right between my eyes. The crimson was all I could see; suddenly, it seemed like the desperation had disintegrated, and I was calm once more. It was red. Red was the color I had always clung to as his source of comfort. Red meant I was with the person he loved most, and that meant I was okay. It was okay. 

One last time. I relished the taste, the hue of his name spilling from my lips. “…Kankri.”

“Cronus.”

_Kankri…_

“Cronus? Please - say something. I can’t hear you.”

_I love you, Kankri._

“Cronus? Cronus, answer me, now.”

_You’re here, aren’t you? Don’t leave._

And as long as he was there, I could close my eyes with a smile, the same smile I would have worn after I kissed the love of my life, the same smile I would have worn when I saw those bright crimson eyes blink at me, reminding him what I lived for. What I would die for.

“Cronus!”

The last thing I saw was red. But that was alright.

**Author's Note:**

> It was quite a challenge writing this; I broke my own heart along the way.


End file.
